OLAN MONK

Matteo Pini Songs for Nothing was written upon your return to your hometown of Connemara. How did placehood shape the sound of the record? 
Olan Monk Connemara is the origin of my music practice. I grew up in a quite barren-looking landscape in the coastal region, and I can see now that it was very inspiring to me. It led me to turn inwards, to try and draw something from the environment and put it into writing and making music. After having lived abroad for years, in some ways this record is a return to that feeling and experience. 

MP What role did music play within your childhood?
OM I come from a musical background; my mother is a piano teacher, so classical music was always in our home. I grew up surrounded by different kinds of music – classical at home, traditional Irish music in my community, and my own interest in rock and grunge. We moved to Connemara when I was young, where I went to school and was immersed in Gaelic culture. Like everyone at my school, I took tin whistle lessons, which I enjoyed until, at about ten, I bought a guitar and decided I wanted to play Nirvana songs instead. As an adult spending time in Connemara, I’ve come to appreciate how unique its music culture is, with deep connections to old singing styles and instrumental traditions. While living in Portugal, I connected with other migratory music cultures – Portuguese, Brazilian, Cape Verdean – each with its own regional character. Returning to the west of Ireland, I realised how remarkable the music I grew up with was and infused that into my new work.

MP I'm interested in the use of the tin whistle across the album. It doesn't feel like a “fusion” of traditional Irish music and electronic textures; it feels more like you're telling a story about our relationship between tradition and modernity.
OM I totally agree. I'm not into fusion as an approach in general. I played the tin whistle like a 10-year-old in a lot of this album. It was like a reparative process of coming back to where I stopped with some of these traditions as a child, and approaching them through my contemporary, electronic practice. Making the record, I worked with musicians across different genres, but it's still very much an electronic rock record, with these traditional elements bleeding through the walls. They have a shadow presence in the work.

MP You enlist a wide network of collaborators on this record – artists like Michael Spears, Maria Somerville,  Róisín Berkeley. Was this the intention going into the recording, or was it more of an organic form of collaboration?
OM The intention was to open it up to other performers. It’s the most collaborative record I’ve made – many of the people involved are from, or living in, Connemara or elsewhere in Ireland. We didn’t approach it in any prescribed way; a lot of the time, it was about layering. It had this Irish traditional session energy to it. I’m not a session player, but it carried that feeling of someone just stepping in and joining the music. It felt very true to how people make music there, and that spirit definitely made it onto the record. 

MP It's interesting how the introduction of other people can help contextualise what you want from your own music.
OM This is the closest I’ve been to having a band project. A lot of the live shows I'm working towards will be with the band. I'm going to try and have as many of these people join on stage as possible. It doesn't feel like a solo record at all. 

MP Could you speak about how sean-nós, a traditional, unaccompanied style of singing, has been incorporated into the album? 
OM It’s important to know it's not an album of sean-nós music: it's inspired by the tradition but these are mainly English-language songs. In terms of this record, it was more about how they informed the songwriting process. Sean-nós songs are about love, loss and landscape; they tell you about an area or an experience. I'm drawn to the slower and sadder songs, many of which are so old we don't know their origin. The last track on the record, Amhrán Mhaínse, is the most obviously indebted in terms of the guitar and accordion arrangement.  There's a phrase in Irish that translates to “There are two ways to tell a story, but there are 12 ways to tell a song.” I was thinking about how sean-nós songs have been arranged differently depending on the era. I was trying to think of how I can write and arrange songs that can speak to our times now in terms of their atmosphere or their sentiment. There is a certain amount of translation there between Irish and English, and that's also why all the instrumentals have Irish language names, because they could convey something I couldn’t quite communicate lyrically. 

MP I was intrigued by the title of the album, Songs for Nothing. What does “nothing” mean in this context?
OM That is open to interpretation. I was working with that title for years, with no real collection in mind. It could be devotional, but it could also be transactional. I guess the clearest meaning is an offering with no return, trying to speak out into my memory of the environment and feeling like I was speaking, singing, or screaming out into no return.  It's a misconception that there's nothing out there: the bog lands are some of the busiest places in terms of insect, animal and plant life, but they give the feeling that there was once much more there. The nothing is a questionable nothing. 

MP Your description of an offering expecting nothing in return reminded me of the current music industry and how people are encouraged to give their artistry away for a tiny sum to Spotify.
OM You're right. I wanted to make this record and offer it up to the landscape, to people, to everyone. I don't expect that it will resolve anything and I also don't expect it to come to anything else and that's OK. 

MP You've mentioned in past interviews a debt towards Sinéad O'Connor. In the wake of her untimely passing, what did you learn from her as an artist who laid herself really bare?
OM I'm still learning from her. We're realising in hindsight, as sadly people often do when someone is gone, the immensity of her contribution to music and culture at large. She had very vulnerable personal songs, and she performed other people's songs in ways no one imagined. She wasn't afraid to do things like mix dub music and sean-nós music. People would have laughed at some of these things. But she's a visionary in all aspects of her career, as well as someone who's spoken out for people who couldn't. In these times, we need more of that; we need more solidarity and expression of truth.

Songs for Nothing is out on 7th November on AD 93. Olan will be playing Ormside Projects on 11 December.